Saturday Afternoon Movie Matinee

My favorite scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark:

At first, I wasn’t particularly motivated to go see the new Indiana Jones movie. As I got older, I saw how cartoony it all was (I loved the first movie, but even as a teenager, when Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom came out, the action sequences were so far-fetched, it required a willing suspension of disbelief I just couldn’t bring to the table) and it ruined much of the enjoyment.

Plus, I wasn’t that interested in seeing an aging Harrison Ford cracking his whip (I thought he was supposed to have gained immortality from The Last Crusade?) for the sake of nostalgia. But then I heard about this:

Russian Communist party members condemned the new Indiana Jones‘ film on Friday as crude anti-Soviet propaganda that distorted history and called for it to be banned from Russian screens.Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull stars Harrison Ford as an archeologist in 1957 competing with an evil KGB agent, played by Cate Blanchett, to find a skull endowed with mystic powers.

“What galls is how together with America we defeated Hitler, and how we sympathized when Bin Laden hit them. But they go ahead and scare kids with Communists. These people have no shame,” said Viktor Perov, a Communist Party member in Russia‘s second city of St Petersburg.

Hmm….were the Russians really “together” with America when it came to Saddam Hussein? And should we still consider Russia “together” with America as we face current dangers, including Islamic terrorism?

“Scare kids with communists”? The Red Scare was real: A conservative estimate of 61 million in Soviet Russia, murdered by communism. Everywhere, around the world, they were testing and probing western resolve; of whether or not America was willing to defend its interests.

Other communists said the generation born after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union were being fed revisionist, Hollywood history. They advocated banning the Indiana Jones outright to prevent “ideological sabotage.”

“Our movie-goers are teenagers who are completely unaware of what happened in 1957,” St Petersburg Communist Party chief Sergei Malinkovich told Reuters.

“They will go to the cinema and will be sure that in 1957 we made trouble for the United States and almost started a nuclear war.”

“It’s rubbish … In 1957 the communists did not run with crystal skulls throughout the U.S. Why should we agree to that sort of lie and let the West trick our youth?”

Vladimir Mukhin, another member of the local Communist Party, said in comments posted on the Internet site that he would ask Russia’s Culture Ministry to ban the film for its “anti-Soviet propaganda.”

It’s a movie. A fantasy-adventure. Anyone who confuses a Steven Spielberg directed Indiana Jones narrative as a good substitute for opening up a history book, needs to have their brain examined.

So yesterday I went to see the movie. I might not have seen it, if not for the controversy, giving it some free publicity.

The action is fit for a cartoon, the plot juvenile. Take it for what it is- escapist entertainment- and you might have a good time. And it just might stimulate some interest in looking at the actual history of crystal skulls….and the communist Soviet Union.